DIGITAL VOICES OF EMPOWERMENT: A CYBERFEMINISTIC DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S ADVOCACY FOR EDUCATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA

The study examines how women use social media discourse to advocate for women’s and girls’ education, challenge patriarchal ideologies, and construct narratives of empowerment and digital agency. The study adopts a qualitative research design and analyses 50 publicly available Instagram posts selected through purposive sampling. The analysis is theoretically informed by Donna Haraway’s Cyberfeminist/Cyborg Feminist perspective (1991), which conceptualizes technologically mediated spaces as sites where gendered identities and power relations can be contested and renegotiated. Norman Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of Critical Discourse Analysis (1989, 1992) is employed as the principal analytical framework to examine the selected posts at the textual, discursive-practice, and social-practice levels. The findings indicate that women employ rhetorical questions, contrast, repetition, positive lexicalisation, metaphor, imperative constructions, collective pronouns, and hashtags to construct education as a pathway to critical consciousness, autonomy, leadership, and social transformation. The discourse also challenges patriarchal expectations concerning female obedience, domestic roles, silence, and restricted participation in institutional and economic life. At the level of discursive practice, hashtags, intertextual references, and collective forms of address facilitate the circulation and amplification of feminist messages, transforming individual expressions into broader forms of digital advocacy. From a cyberfeminist perspective, Instagram functions as a participatory space in which women articulate alternative gender narratives, exercise digital agency, and contribute to feminist resistance and awareness-building. The study concludes that social media discourse can reposition women’s education from an individual developmental concern to a collective demand for equality, freedom, empowerment, and social change. Keywords: Cyberfeminism; Digital Feminist Activism; Women’s Education; Critical Discourse Analysis; Digital Empowerment.